This year Instagram will rival Amazon in terms of ecommerce disruption

This time last year Instagram launched Checkout in beta in the US. The feature, currently only available to a number of selected brands, points to a very near future where most of our shopping takes place on social channels.

Checkout, in a nutshell, lets users order and pay for items within the Instagram app itself. While we see other platforms in the US and UK building ecommerce functionalities into their offerings, like Pinterest’s Lens, Facebook’s shoppable tags and sales alerts, all of them currently still direct users to the retailer’s website for the final transaction. Instagram Checkout is the first in-app commerce development and is blurring the lines between social and ecommerce.

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